Especially in an age where so many activities and functions depend on a continuous supply of power, lapses or interruptions in the provision of power may lead to highly undesirable results. These recent years have seen a fast-growing market for readily accessible power, such as in batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells, and other energy storage devices. However, such energy storage devices are often limited in many aspects. For example, they may be volatile or unstable under certain operating conditions (e.g., temperature, pressure) and become ineffective or pose a safety hazard. In some cases, an energy storage device may itself be consumed during one or more cycles of converting or storing energy and thus have limited lifetime. In some cases, a rate of charging may be too slow to effectively support or satisfy a rate of consumption of power.